Political science

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How Standards Solve the Problems of Supply Chain Disintegration for Interdependent Technologies
(2025-10-02) Owen, Lucas; Menaldo, Victor
Why do firms coordinate to create technology standards? While prior scholars have largely focused on the role of technology standards in facilitating interoperability to enhance network effects, none have focused on the role of standards in coordinating and diffusing co-specific innovation. From this perspective, interoperability standards address two tiers of a nested problem of asset co-specificity. At the component stage, modularity erodes asset specificity in supply chains and networks. At the standard creation stage, the contractual obligations embedded in technology standards limit opportunism between contributors, allowing them to create co-specific intellectual property without fear of hold-up. I demonstrate this logic with a formal model, and explore nuances and implications in case studies of Nvidia and Apple. I also evaluate robust empirical evidence. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that standards tend to greatly reduce litigation over standard-essential intellectual property. Finally, I attempt to adjudicate between theories of merit-based idea selection and rent-seeking in standard setting processes and in SEP declarations. While results on idea selection are inconclusive on both sides, evidence suggests that SEP declarations are based on merit and heuristics, and are not driven by rent-seeking.
Embedded Giants: The Political Economy of Production Networks and Local Business Environments in China
(2025-08-01) Lin, Tao; Whiting, Susan
Why do governments differ in the quality of business environments they provide, even under similar political institutions and levels of economic development? This dissertation addresses this puzzle by developing and empirically testing a theory of how firm-level production network complexity shapes both business demand and government supply of public goods. I argue that large firms embedded in complex production networks—those with dense, multi-stage, and interdependent supplier and client relationships—have stronger incentives to seek improvements in legal, regulatory, and infrastructural conditions, and also have greater leverage to induce government responsiveness. These firms face higher coordination risks and are more sensitive to transaction costs in the external business environment, making public goods more critical to their operations.The empirical chapters draw on firm-level survey data, annual reports of publicly listed firms, and firm registry records in China. Chapter 3 shows that firms with high levels of backward and forward linkages place greater importance on business-related public goods. Chapter 4 demonstrates that firms benefit not only from their own political connections but also from those of their supply chain partners in accessing government subsidies. Chapter 5 shifts to the local level, showing that counties where large firms are embedded in complex production networks are more likely to invest in business-friendly infrastructure and regulatory practices. A case study of Kunshan illustrates the underlying mechanisms and addresses endogeneity concerns. By integrating insights from political economy, development studies, and organizational theory, this dissertation advances our understanding of how the structural characteristics of industrial organizations and market economies shape state behavior and governance. It contributes to the literature on state-business relations and industrial policy, offering new perspectives on China’s subnational governance and the political consequences of industrial development.
Mapping the Interior: Land Offices, Technology, and Bureaucratic Development in 19th Century America
(2025-08-01) Grove, Jeffrey Merrill; Francis, Megan
Founded in 1812, the General Land Office (GLO) was the bureaucratic engine of American settler expansion. Beginning in the early 1800s as a loosely affiliated network of land offices, the GLO would develop throughout the 19th century into the primary institution which determined the pattern and process of settlement in the American west. In this dissertation, I argue that the GLO developed this power through a process of bureaucratic consolidation. As the agency consolidated, the GLO utilized technologies of mapping and contract to claim autonomous power. These technologies of land management were bound to the racial and social order of American political development. Political elites created early land offices to establish control over settler populations. Rather than seeking to dominate these distant populations through force, elites used the public provisions of the land office to encourage settlers to recognize the American state. I demonstrate this process using the case of Mississippi Territory, where land offices gave formal recognition to settler property rights, providing economic security for settlers and forming the foundation for the growth of enslavement in the region. As settlement expanded under President Andrew Jackson many of the processes undergirding the structure of early land offices became increasingly untenable under the GLO. In 1836, this would become a crisis for the agency, creating a critical juncture and leading to the first major consolidation of the GLO after Congressional action. However, in passing new legislation, Congress failed to change the fundamental structure of GLO technologies. In 1849, the GLO would consolidate again, becoming part of the newly created Department of Interior. In this new department, the office would seek to exercise autonomous power through its technologies of mapping and contract. Examining the case of Oregon Territory, I show that, collaborating with the Office of Indian Affairs, the GLO would claim the power to map Indian Reservations, despite lacking the formal authority. This project would lay the foundation for allotment, leading to the seizure of Indigenous land and the forced assimilation of Native nations. By the end of the 19th century, the consolidation and autonomy of the GLO had reached their peak. However, with new modes of land management emerging, the outdated technologies of the GLO would struggle to adapt. As a result, the 20th century would lead to the decline of the GLO as a center of bureaucratic power.
Shaping Civil Society: Media, Donors and Public Trust in Southeast Asian NGOs
(2025-05-12) Parr, Christianna; Prakash, Aseem
This dissertation examines how perceptions of civil society are shaped by social media, organizational attributes, and elite media narratives. Empirically, I focus on perceptions of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in Southeast Asia. Combining a cross-national survey, a conjoint experiment, and machine learning analysis, this three-paper dissertation investigates the following questions: (1) How does social media usage influence trust in NGOs compared to governmental institutions in hybrid and authoritarian regimes? (2) What organizational traits drive donor support for ENGOs? (3) How do elite media portrayals of ENGOs differ based on their service or advocacy orientations? Chapter 1 utilizes the Asian Barometer Data to explore if social media enhances trust in NGOs by creating civic spaces for political expression, while eroding confidence in governmental institutions due to public scrutiny of the state on these platforms. I determine that social media usage is associated with reduced trust in governmental institutions but enhances trust in NGOs. Chapter 2 uses a conjoint experiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to examine donor preferences for ENGOs. I find that individual donors favor organizations that prioritize regional issues, partner with regional organizations and promote gender inclusive leadership. Chapter 3 analyzes English-language media coverage of Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) using machine learning techniques. I find systematic biases against advocacy orientated organizations. Service-oriented ENGOs like WWF received positive, trust-laden portrayals while groups like Greenpeace are framed as disruptive and face negative sentiment. This dissertation advances debates on civil society's role under restrictive regimes and the potential future of environmental organizations in emerging donor markets. The findings highlight the importance of a locally rooted civil society, one that is funded and supported by domestic actors, as a foundation for greater legitimacy.
Dynasts or Disruptors: Gender and Representation in the Philippines Legislature
(2024-10-16) Goehrung, Ryan; Cichowski, Rachel
The purpose of this project is to explore in-depth whether the identity of elected agentsmeasurably contributes to the goal of achieving more representative democracies. The push for more diverse legislatures is one of the most significant global reform efforts of the twenty-first century with more than 150 countries having adopted measures to facilitate or require increased gender, racial, or ethnic diversity in their national legislatures since 1990. Yet, there is still no scholarly consensus on the substantive effects of increased diversity in legislatures. Though an expansive and growing literature on diversity in representation has identified a broad range of possible effects, the consensus is that the relationship between increased descriptive diversity (in any form) and substantive outcomes is not straightforwardly deterministic, but rather weak, probabilistic, and contingent on a number of other institutional, contextual, and individual factors (Dodson 2006; Celis and Childs 2014; EspÃrito-Santo, Freire, and Serra-Silva 2020). Still, scholars view the study of the descriptive-substantive link as worthwhile and maintain that diversity of identity is relevant to the study of political representation (Mackay 2008; WÃ¤ngnerud 2009). With this complexity and the difficulty of detecting measurable effects in mind, this project takes a broad, exploratory approach to evaluate a wide array of potential consequences that increased diversity in the legislature might engender in a context that has received scant attention, the Philippines. This project offers three innovations. First, I take a ‘thick’ view of representation (Mackay 2008) drawing on literatures from feminist theory, social psychology, feminist institutionalism, and diversity in representation, to identify and evaluate a wide range of potential impacts that more diverse legislatures might have. Second, I develop a novel Pathways Framework for categorizing and studying the potential avenues through which diversity in representation might exert a substantive influence on policies, populations, and parliaments. Third, I test this broad range of existing theories in a context that I argue is a least-likely case study and therefore provides a novel and informative testing ground for these theories. My goal is not to demonstrate causality per se, but rather to determine if empirical evidence in support of a relationship between descriptive diversity and substantive outcomes, broadly construed, can be detected in a least-likely context. Using the Pathways Framework, I take a sustained, holistic approach to examining the potential consequences of women’s growing presence in the legislature over time. Though I find limited support that women’s increased presence in the legislature measurably influences policy outcomes or women’s exposure to harm, as measured by two comprehensive indices, I uncover multiple ways that women legislators consistently advocate for and act on behalf of women at greater rates than men. These findings add to the feminist institutionalism literature by demonstrating that, while women continue to be disadvantaged in the context of historically male-dominated institutions, they are nonetheless able to innovate and bring valuable perspectives to the policymaking table, which challenge dominant gender norms and advance the interests of women and other marginalized groups.
The Political Economy of American Clean Energy Innovation
(2024-10-16) Wittstock, Nicolas; Menaldo, Victor
Why have American inventors produced so much technological innovation in clean energy technology while American policymakers' record on climate policy has generally been considered underwhelming? Under what circumstances does the US federal government act to foster technological change and what form do such policies typically take? The central topic of this dissertation is American innovation policy, specifically in the context of clean energy technology. I investigate and theorize the circumstances under which federal institutions engage in innovation policy, provide a novel analysis of such policies in the context of clean energy technology, and investigate the political effects such policy has had over recent decades. Chapter 1 of this dissertation opens by identifying and demonstrating that American inventors remain the most prolific source of technological innovation in clean energy technology. While USPTO patent records suggest that the rest of the world caught up in the 1990s, the percentage of all patents granted to American inventors in key technology areas increased again in the 2000s. I contrast this reality with the prediction of the environmental policy literature’s focus on pollution-pricing as providing key incentives for private actors to innovate. The American state has ostensibly not created a public policy environment conducive to technological innovation in alternative energy technology. I provide a detailed discussion of the specific market failures that are assumed to challenge the creation, development, and diffusion of alternative energy technologies. Further, I discuss different approaches to solving these market failures. I then argue that the American political economy faces a set of enduring institutional barriers to the implementation of innovation policy. In doing so, I make several theoretical and conceptual contributions. I argue that the institutional barriers to federal innovation policy are typically only overcome in the context of enduring socio-economic challenges or war. When federal innovation policy is implemented, it remains subject to ongoing Congressional pressures, which have often halted or curtailed it. I suggest that this institutional structure creates American innovation policy that typically involves dedicated federal agencies with considerable R&D budgets but limited bureaucratic capacity. This results in policy efforts that are highly decentralized, and in which federal agencies primarily play a coordinating role, while major R&D tasks are outsourced to universities and firms. Further, federal innovation policy heavily focuses on providing R&D and funding for desired technologies rather than directly regulating the use of technologies. I draw on four historical cases of federal innovation policy to demonstrate these points. I also provide an account of the role of federal agencies within the contemporary American innovation ecosystem. Chapter 2 proposes that concerns over energy security and demand for alternative energy technology by the Department of Defense (DoD) in the early 2000s have been crucial drivers of American innovation policy related to clean energy technology. In doing so, I document the close connection between military-related research and American clean energy innovation. I show that federal policy related to clean energy has focused on investments in basic science and R&D by the Departments of Energy and Defense, which have often been conducted in close cooperation with private companies and universities. Federal agencies have also conducted public demonstration projects, and DoD has been an important source of demand for clean energy technologies. Yet, federal efforts have overwhelmingly focused on the creation and improvement of new technology. There have been comparatively few dedicated efforts to raise the domestic uptake and diffusion of these technologies. To make this case, Chapter 2 presents two empirical approaches that demonstrate the impact of federal innovation policy in clean energy. Descriptively, I present a network analysis of clean energy patent citations showing that federal agencies are the most important sources of inventions in the US clean energy ecosystem. Here, I also make a methodological contribution, as this is the first network analysis of clean energy patent citations that I am aware of. Further, leveraging records of public-private research cooperation, I show that companies that collaborate with federal agencies increase their subsequent patenting output significantly, providing evidence for the innovation-boosting effect of recent public-private partnerships in this area. In Chapter 3, I broaden the scope of my investigation by testing how federal R&D initiatives have affected different geographic areas across the US. I document evidence of a Matthew effect, as a small number of areas have expanded their advantages in generating new technologies over time. The clean energy R&D push by DOE and DoD in the early 2000s has been strongly focused on a small set of major innovation hubs, substantially raising the geographic inequality in clean energy innovation. Drawing on geo-located patent records in clean energy technology from the USPTO, I show that areas receiving larger amounts of public R&D investments as evidenced by publicly funded patents also show larger numbers of private follow-on innovation. American innovation policy has thus contributed to the uneven contribution to technological innovation of different regions of the country. In Chapter 4, I use the case of the dedicated energy research agency ARPA-E, implemented in 2009, to gain additional empirical traction on the impact of federal R&D investment. I leverage data on the geography of ARPA-E participant organizations to estimate a Difference-in-Differences model with staggered treatment adoption, demonstrating that areas hosting ARPA-E partners have raised their patenting rates in clean energy technology significantly more than comparable areas. I provide novel evidence from an original dataset demonstrating both the effectiveness of ARPA-E, as investigation of how federal initiatives reinforce the innovation advantages of some regions over others. In Chapter 5, I investigate the political effects of the geographical concentration of innovative activity in clean energy in the United States. I create a novel dataset of political campaign donations of entrepreneurs and workers in the clean energy industry. This analysis of the political donation behaviour of clean energy industry insiders is the first to my knowledge. I show that US clean energy entrepreneurs and workers have become increasingly more ideologically aligned with the Democratic party while also being overwhelmingly physically located in innovation clusters. I thus provide new evidence showing that the American clean energy industry has so far been mostly concentrated in high-technology clusters, and that Democrats have politically benefitted from their embrace of climate policy. Yet, the political constituency represented by this industry remains concentrated in a small number of areas, which undermines its political influence.
The Currency of Crisis: Empathy and Identity in Political Economy
(2024-10-16) Nelson, Travis J; Mercer, Jonathan
While economists have increasingly acknowledged behavioral theories of preference formation, political economists have been more apprehensive about bringing in social psychology. Specifically looking at the global financial crisis and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis, I put forth a behavioral theory of preference formation in political economy. Empathy and identity play a critical role in shaping how individuals form groups, how crises are framed in public discourse, and how the issue framing affects policy outcomes. I use newspaper text and machine learning to demonstrate the prevalence of competing crisis frames based upon creditor, debtor, and outsider frames. I then look at government reports and provide a qualitative analysis of the reforms enacted as a response to the economic crises in the European Union. I argue that policy preferences, post-crisis, stem not from calculations concerning one’s own pocketbook, or from purely pro-social calculations regarding the country’s economic position; rather, preferences form in a manner consistent with more hedonic, experiential, calculations stemming from empathy for one’s own perceived community and identity group that are molded by prior held beliefs, biases, and race.
Under Watchful Eyes: How Surveillance Technologies Collect and Disseminate Information for the State
(2024-10-16) Guo, Zhaowen; Whiting, Susan SW
Surveillance entails the systematic and routine collection of data to inform governance strategies, often designed to be minimally intrusive to avoid public scrutiny and justified by the need for public safety. However, China's surveillance apparatus has pervasively intruded into private lives and expanded broadly in a highly visible manner, yet it has managed to minimize public backlash. My dissertation investigates the underlying purposes behind this governmental expansion of surveillance and citizen perceptions of this extensive growth. Contrary to conventional wisdom that primarily views surveillance as a tool for information collection, I argue that it also serves a role in information dissemination, which occurs through the sustained deployment of labor-intensive surveillance measures and the incorporation of moral framing in promoting surveillance initiatives. Drawing upon a comprehensive database on surveillance and resistance in China, the first essay demonstrates that despite the availability of cost-effective digital alternatives, the Chinese government continues to rely on human operators for surveillance given their effectiveness in preventing grievances from escalating into unrest. The second essay illustrates that individual moral convictions strongly predict support for surveillance in China with evidence from the World Values Survey. This suggests that surveillance is perceived as aligned with moral imperatives rather than a compromise of morals for security. The third essay employs a survey experiment to examine the impacts of specific moral frames - care, fairness, and authority - on support for surveillance. The findings indicate that all these moral frames significantly enhance support for surveillance, with the care frame producing the most substantial and broad-based increase in support.
No More "Sticking to Sports": Black Athlete Activism and Its Political Consequences
(2024-10-16) Mayer, Sebastian; Parker, Christopher S; Wallace, Sophia J
This dissertation seeks to understand the political consequences of Black athlete activism. Despite the longstanding intersection of sports and politics, social-scientific inquiries into this symbiosis and its consequences for the political arena remain mostly absent. Most existing accounts of athlete activism, and the connection between sports and politics more broadly, only reach a descriptive, exploratory stage. In contrast, this dissertation offers empirical analyses to interrogate Black athletes’ political influence. Apart from offering a history of Black athlete activism that runs counter to notions of a recent politicization of sports, I show that Black athletes are involved in a wide range of political advocacy online and receive strong engagement from the public, making it a viable avenue for Black athletes’ political activism. On top, I demonstrate that Black athletes can successfully influence policy preferences and mobilize the Black community to participate politically, making them elite political actors. Overall, my findings suggest that sports and politics not only have anecdotal interconnections, but directly impact each other historically, as well as in contemporary times. In short, I content that the study of Black athlete activism offers crucial insights into the politics of the Black community, and American politics more broadly.
The Dictator as Discriminating Monopsonist; and the Rally Effect in Wartime Ukraine
(2024-09-09) Garner, Calvin; Long, James D.
This dissertation engages with questions from the study of authoritarianism and international conflict. Most authoritarian regimes today are multi-party authoritarian regimes, often with a dominant party that shapes policy and controls the flow of rents, and one or more parties in ``loyal'' opposition. This leads to a puzzle: how does the presence of multiple parties benefit the authoritarian leader, and why would someone join a loyal opposition party instead of the dominant party? I present a new model of the authoritarian regime as a discriminating monopsonist. By providing elites expressive benefits and rents through the choice of political parties, authoritarian regimes economize on the purchase of regime support. I test this theory by analyzing party switching by Duma deputies in Russia in 2006-2007 and find preliminary support for the model's expectations. The second question examines the ``rally ‘round the flag'' effect in Ukraine following Russia's 2014 invasion. It adds to the existing literature by asking how ethnic identity and conflict proximity relate to attitudes towards the home state and the adversary. Using a lab-based implicit association test (IAT) and survey, we examine whether implicit biases, reflexive preferences that are hard to manipulate, match explicitly stated preferences for either Ukraine or Russia. We find that, on average, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine are explicitly and implicitly pro-Ukraine, although we observe slightly lower levels of pro-Ukraine bias among ethnic Russians. This study was first published in International Studies Quarterly (Erlich & Garner, 2021).
Dynamics of Violence, Governance, and Change: How Violent Non-State Actors Adapt to Shifting Social Orders
(2024-09-09) Erickson, Megan K.; Wallace, Geoffrey P.R.
Violent non-state actors must endure large-scale shocks to the environment in which they operate, thereby transforming how they use violence, govern civilians, engage in the economy, or relate to the state. Economic, social, or political shifts change relationships among licit and illicit actors, generating different incentives for how these organizations engage with the world around them. In areas where the state is weak, non-state actors can take advantage of the power vacuum and fill in for the state in places where it is unable to reach. The transformational power of major events such as expanding markets due to free trade agreements, natural disasters, changes in leadership or regime type, or even the end of conflict itself thus demands consideration to further our understanding of how different groups continue to reproduce violence in diverse contexts. In this dissertation, I seek to explore these processes by examining how non-state actors use violence, adapt to shifting social orders, and exercise control in the context of political violence and organized crime. Chapter 2, "Blood Avocados? Trade Liberalization and Cartel Violence in Mexico" (co-authored with Lucas Owen), explores this phenomenon in the context of trade liberalization policies with the Mexican avocado market. Several prominent studies predict that expanding markets in areas of low state capacity may decrease organized crime due to the opportunity cost mechanism, holding that booms in licit markets shift labor away from illicit markets. We posit an additional mechanism to explain the decrease in criminal violence – an influx in capital allows market actors to invest in self-defense forces to combat criminal incursions. We test this logic using the case of the Mexican avocado industry with a staggered difference-in-differences design and find that trade liberalization throughout the 2010s has a significant negative effect on cartel-related homicides compared to other violence-prone areas. Robust qualitative evidence highlighting the emergence of self-defense groups to deter criminal actors in the avocado industry supports the vigilante mechanism. By using a unique empirical case to test a novel mechanism, this article therefore contributes to the literature on the consequences of trade liberalization on organized crime. In Chapter 3, "Not So Sweet: External Price Shocks, State Capacity, and Violence from Madagascar’s Vanilla Industry," I explore this phenomenon in the context of shifts in the price and demand of Malagasy vanilla by posing the following question: to what extent do adjustments to Western consumer markets drive cycles of crime and civil resistance in areas of virtually no state capacity? As Chapter 2 explores, an expanding literature holds that shocks to labor-intensive industries lead to a decrease in crime and violence. However, these studies assume at least a nominal level of state capacity. In areas of little to no state capacity, there are no structures to protect those who gain and lose from an influx of capital. As such, I posit two hypotheses – first, a positive shock to labor-intensive commodities will lead to an increase of crime in areas most impacted by the shock; and second, an increase of crime will lead to an increase of vigilante violence to fill the power vacuum of the state. To test these conjectures, I leverage the case of the vanilla industry in Madagascar, which experienced a 12-fold increase in prices when NestlÃ¨ announced it would no longer use synthetic vanilla in 2015. I pursue a mixed-method approach by first introducing novel data on local crime in Madagascar. Using a synthetic control design, I find that the 2015 policy led to a strong positive effect on crime in vanilla-producing regions. I then use qualitative data from interviews with vanilla farmers to demonstrate that vigilante violence is on the rise as a form of retribution, protection, and justice. This research is significant because it explores an unique empirical case by introducing novel data on crime in an area where data availability is limited. Chapter 4, "Getting to the Hereafter: Variation in the Survival and Transformation of Pro-Government Militias," is a thematic parallel to the earlier studies in the dissertation on economic shocks and subsequent cycles of criminal and vigilante violence. It explores how socio-political shocks brought on by the end of conflict or crisis creates incentives for violent non-state actors to alter their group identity and behavior to adapt to the world around them. I specifically examine the conditions under which pro-government militias (PGMs) survive after they are meant to formally terminate; and, of those that survive, what explains the variation in the type of group they become. Using inductive theory-building, I hypothesize the role of six explanatory frameworks – organizational structure, power sharing, government relation, group identity, conflict characteristics, and state capacity. I test the effect of these six explanatory frameworks by developing a multi-methods program called the PGM Transformation Project, a quantitative and qualitative dataset accounting for the post-termination identities of 325 PGMs from 1982 to 2017. First, using a logistic regression, I find that two primary conditions driving PGM survival: group networks in terms of identity-based recruitment strategies, and ties to the state in terms of power-sharing measures. Second, using a multinomial logistic regression, I find that that organizational structure and state capacity dictate the conditions under which groups turn to local defense, politics, states forces, or counter-state operations. The contribution of this research is the advancement of an original data program accounting for the afterlife of PGMs, a novel resource for those studying the impact these actors have on the causes and consequences of political violence. I conclude in Chapter 5. In addition to suggesting limitations to my studies as well as avenues for future research, I discuss the collective implications of my research for theory, empirics, and policy. This dissertation speaks to the effect of varying levels of group organization and state capacity on the likelihood that different non-state groups will use violence as they adapt to large-scale shocks to the environment in which they operate. It investigates the multiple pathways groups may take to pursue such violence; in particular, it illuminate the various ways in which groups turn to vigilantism following economic or socio-political shocks. To understand these processes, I utilize a diverse set of data – from publicly-available government sources, from interviews conducted during fieldwork, and from a novel hand-collected dataset – to test how violent non-state actors adapt to the world around them.
Managing Emancipation: Land, Labor, and the Reconstruction of the American State
(2024-09-09) Ceballos, Rutger Lukas; Francis, Megan M
This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of Emancipation on the development of the American federal state in the mid-19th century. Although political scientists and historians have identified the Emancipation Proclamation as a transformative moment in the history of the United States, there has been relatively little attention paid to the effects of Emancipation on institutional development and the expansion of state power. Drawing on a wide range of primary source archival research, I show how the federal government used land and labor policies to manage the process of Emancipation and grow the power of the central government. I argue the origins of Reconstruction and, by extension, much of the contemporary US political and economic order lies in the policies enacted to manage the process of Emancipation. My research shows how the complex interactions between freed Black workers, federal officials, and white employers fundamentally reshaped racialized labor and property relations in the aftermath of Emancipation. Lastly, I center the role of emancipated Black people in this process by showing how freedpeople contested state-building processes through non-formal avenues of political power (labor strikes, land claims, federal bureaucrats, etc.) to advance their visions of freedom. In short, this dissertation argues that the modern American state cannot be fully understood without attending to its origins in the Civil War and Emancipation.
Thoughtlessness in the Age of Homeland Security: Race, Bureaucracy, and the Making of Modern Immigration Enforcement
(2024-09-09) Young, Dennis Michael Sewell; Turner III, Jack; McCann, Michael W
This dissertation examines the politics of bureaucratic development in the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with attention to the ways that bureaucratic processes and policymaking shape racial hierarchy in the contemporary era. I argue that contemporary bureaucracies primarily shape race by working to expand and enhance their department’s bureaucratic capacity through modernization and efficiency improving processes. Within each agency, bureaucrats work towards producing efficiency and attempt to demonstrate success in ways that are facially race-neutral but in fact rely upon racial imaginaries. In the context of homeland security, a racial and carceral imagination of who is an “illegal” immigrant undergirds the department as a whole. As such, when bureaucrats work to optimize the departmental processes, the result is improving and expanding tools of social control such as immigrant surveillance, detention, and deportation. This phenomenon is racialized because the primary targets of the enforcement apparatus are Latinx, and as a more efficient architecture is built, the DHS is better able to police the Latinx migrant community. I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to argue that a major impact of bureaucratic development is inducing thoughtlessness amongst DHS bureaucrats. Here, thoughtlessness refers to the inability to see outside of the work of bureaucracy to examine the particular harm done to those on the other end of the policy. Bureaucrats are institutionally incentivized to focus on performance optimization and in doing so, the human consequences of immigration enforcement are hidden from bureaucrats. To make this argument, I conducted an archival analysis of around 32,000 pages of internal bureaucratic documents from the DHS. This document set spans the time from 2002-2022 and includes documentation such as inspections, FOIA documents, email correspondence, and departmental memoranda. I support this primary document analysis with historical analysis and theoretical work, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Max Weber, as well as critical scholarship on immigration and race such as the work of Mae Ngai, Kelly Tuttle Hernandez, and Patricia Macias-Rojas. To more concretely examine this phenomenon, I center each empirical chapter around a theme of bureaucratic development that I argue has played a major role in expanding the DHS’ role in homeland security. The first empirical chapter focuses on the role of data and metrics in supporting a carceral imagination of homeland security. In this chapter, I argue that the DHS’ focus on carceral solutions to the problem of immigration has led to the use of increasingly granular and seemingly objective performance metrics. However, these metrics reify ideas of homeland security that focus on detaining and deporting racialized immigrant groups with little regard for the human costs of this form of enforcement. My second chapter examines the role of modernization discourse in leading to expanded immigrant surveillance. This chapter focuses on how an internal bureaucratic desire for modernized technology has helped substantiate increased surveillance of immigrant communities and a drive for perfect information. The further the DHS pushes in this direction, the more effectively it is able to surveil and police immigrant communities. My final empirical chapter examines how demands for efficiency have driven the DHS into increased reliance on the private sector. Because the private sector is often understood as more efficient than government, the DHS has been systematically incentivized to work more closely with corporations. The result is a massive industry and investment in homeland security, which sustains the racial project of immigration enforcement. The conclusion focuses on how to remedy the harms of bureaucracy, focusing on practices of institutional transformation and care in order to address the harms I describe in the empirical chapters. I conclude by suggesting that there is an urgent need for both radical change in immigration law and the necessity of bureaucratic change in order to promote immigrant justice.
Determinants of Transportation Electrification Policy at Local, Cross-Municipal, and Cross-National Levels
(2024-09-09) Wang, Hanjie; Prakash, Aseem
In this dissertation, I examine the role that governments play in the diffusion and adoption of electric transportation technologies, the challenges faced by governments, as well as the determinants of the type and level of governmental support for EVs. By deploying multi-scale, mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, I uncover why institutions choose different policy instruments in response to the emergence of electric transportation technologies and why similar policy instruments yield different outcomes. By examining interactions among political entities at the local and cross-municipal levels, the study identifies the varied obstacles to green technological transition, how to overcome them at different scales, and proposes policy solutions that can catalyze the adoption of green technologies.This dissertation consists of three articles, each with a different unit of analysis, leveraging different methods, utilizing different types of data, and examining transportation electrification policies at multiple scales. Collectively, they uncover some under-explored factors behind governments’ support for electric mobility. Furthermore, this research project highlights the potential and significance of national trade policy and subnational governments in promoting electric mobility, which is often overlooked. The first article, Protectionism or Climate Change? Neither. Urbanization. Explaining Cross- National Variations in Electric Vehicle Import Tariffs, 2012-2022, investigates what factors influence countries’ trade policies concerning transportation electrification. It finds that countries with higher levels of urbanization are more likely to adopt lower EV import tariffs. Environmental factors, measured by PM 2.5, and climate factors measured by greenhouse gas emissions, do not have any statistically significant effect on countries’ choice of tariff policies. The second and third papers explore local governments' role in supporting transportation electrification at the local level. The second paper, Fueling Electric Vehicles: Motivation behind China’s Municipal-level EV Charging Infrastructure Subsidies, examines the factors driving policies supportive of transportation electrification in China at the municipal level. Based on an original dataset on charging infrastructure subsidy policies in China, covering a total of 335 cities (including directly-administered municipalities, sub-provincial cities, and prefecture-level cities) from 2009 to 2021, this study finds that decisions are influenced by top-down pressures from national governments, policy adoption in neighboring cities, and local industrial pressures. The third paper, Resource, Motivation, and Leadership: Determinants of Local Government Action in Electric Vehicle Uptakes in King County, examines the role of local governments in promoting electric mobility, particularly their actions, motivations, and challenges. Based on 49 comprehensive and in-depth interviews with respondents from 37 local governments (county, cities, and towns) and local stakeholders in King County, Washington, this study identifies three key factors—resources, motivation, and local leadership—that explain variations in local government actions toward transportation electrification.
Identity and Legitimacy: Military Innovation from Scurvy to Agent Orange
(2024-09-09) Colligan, Christopher Patrick; Long, James D
What explains which technologies, organizational forms, and doctrinal practices militaries adopt? This dissertation applies a Social Construction of Technology framework to the realm of military innovation and emphasizes that consensuses regarding the legitimacy of military innovation are essential to understanding the circuitous routes that innovations wind from various periods of adoption and rejection. It does so through three case studies: antiscorbutic development in the Royal Navy, British and American airship development, and military herbicides. These case studies are thematically linked by the non-linear stories each of them tell regarding the tortuous pathways through experimentation, adoption, and rejection. They highlight that periods of closure and stabilization temporarily resulted in adoption, but that (re-)opening interpretive flexibility–particularly along lines of innovation legitimacy–provided new opportunities for re-evaluating adoption or rejection. This interpretive flexibility expanded through the entry of new relevant actors (such as civilian scientists in the case of herbicidal warfare), new organizational imperatives and fundamental missions (in the case of antiscorbutics), and the ability of both new actors and new organizational forms to bring new information and interpretations to bear on innovations.
Seeing Like a Court Judicial Agency in Autocratic Regimes and Transition Politics: The Case of Egypt
(2024-09-09) Salem, Waleed K; McCann, Michael; Migdal, Joel
This dissertation -- a comparative study -- seeks to explain judicial conduct and judicial preferences outside the prisms of "judicial empowerment," "judicial independence," and "judicial activism." It articulates a theory of judicial agency -- what judges want, and how their wants change and adapt in different political settings. I posit judicial agency as a fluid equilibrium among three sets of primary commitments that judges hold: professional (to state legality), associational (to other members of the judicial corps as a status and corporate group), and regime commitments (to the rules and norms structuring government authority). In autocratic regimes where judges and courts are allowed to enact their professional commitments, they are more likely to reciprocate by upholding as well their regime commitments. And vice versa. This complex account of judicial agency explains how courts in autocratic regimes may simultaneously appear activist *and* safeguard the regime's core interests. This study use the judicial agency framework to explain how the judicial conduct of Egyptian courts varied between the Nasser tenure (1954-1970) and the Sadat and Mubarak tenures (1970-2011). It then explains how judicial agency played out during the heightened political uncertainty of the "Arab Spring" period in Egypt (2011-2013). In the penultimate chapter I show how judicial agency and judicialization interact with and aggravate political uncertainty during recent episodes of contention in Turkey, Pakistan, Russia and Hungary. This work contributes to the scholarship on comparative judicial politics, authoritarianism and democratization.
Promises and Pitfalls: Civil Society’s Imperfect Efforts to Address Trafficking and Displacement
(2024-04-26) Castellano, Rachel; Prakash, Aseem
Civil society plays a vital role in providing services and advocating for vulnerable populations.This dissertation includes three papers that examine how civil society actors aim to fill in the gaps left by governmental and market failure to address social issues. These studies address human trafficking and environmental migration, complex human rights issues that suffer from a lack of precise definitions and entail providing services for displaced individuals. The findings highlight ways potential donors, NGOs, and labor unions offer promising avenues for combatting these issues. However, the results also illustrate different types of failures within civil society, highlighting areas for improvement in how these actors should better serve marginalized people. Following an introduction, the first paper examines dominant narratives of human trafficking in the United States. Sensational stories of human trafficking perpetuate a narrative that often misrepresents the true nature of the problem. These stories typically depict a young girl or woman who is sex trafficked and overshadow other cases, such as the labor trafficking of boys and men. The widespread dissemination of these stories from the media, news, and political discourse shapes the public’s understanding of what it looks like. Do these stories also affect who donors perceive as most deserving of their aid? This is an important question because civil society is essential to anti-trafficking efforts in the United States. Furthermore, civil society plays a critical role in anti-trafficking policymaking. Thus, it’s necessary to understand if donor preferences align with these dominant narratives. I conduct a nationally representative survey experiment of potential U.S. donors to examine this. I ask individuals to choose between two fictitious charities to donate to, each serving a different type of trafficking survivor. I theorize that donors will be most likely to support legal services for young girls who are sex trafficked and are non-U.S. citizens. I find support for three out of five of my hypotheses. Overall, donors are most likely to support housing services for young girls who have been sex trafficked and are U.S. citizens. The second paper takes a closer look at labor trafficking in the United States. Labor trafficking remains a concealed and pervasive issue in the United States, overshadowed by the more recognized problem of sex trafficking. A recent analysis revealed that 80% of labor trafficking victims were migrant workers, underscoring the urgent need for attention. Employers often do not face pushback from migrant workers due to issues such as their fear of deportation, visa revocation, language barriers, and lack of community support. Thus, community activists and civil society play an important role in advocating for this population. In response to the prevailing human rights and carceral frameworks to address human trafficking, the paper advocates for a labor rights approach, positioning labor unions as central protectors of workers. I argue that labor protections warrant a collective voice because individual workers, especially migrants, lack the structural power to confront employers. Through a qualitative analysis of 100 U.S. labor union websites, this study explores whether and how these unions address labor trafficking and provide specific migrant protections. I find that unions in sectors with high immigrant salience, such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality, are more likely to include online programming and information directed to migrant members and to protect members from labor exploitation. The third paper turns to environmental migration to assess how migration and refugee organizations in the United States engage with this issue. Climate change is causing widespread environmental degradation and increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, leading to displacement and migration. However, limitations in international refugee law and growing xenophobia decrease the likelihood of sufficient state action in providing environmental migrants with essential services necessary for everyday living. In response to government failure, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will likely emerge as crucial actors in providing services for and advocating on behalf of environmental migrants. What factors are associated with migration and refugee organizations expanding their work to invest in the link between climate change and migration? This question will only become more significant as climate change worsens. Using data from organization websites and public tax forms, I analyze this question by creating an original dataset of 110 migration and refugee organizations in the United States. This study focuses on organizations that serve cross-border environmental migrants rather than internally displaced persons. I further analyze the driving mechanisms by conducting four in-depth interviews - two with organizations that do indicate investing in environmental migration on their website and two with organizations that do not. My findings support a supply-side theory that suggests that more revenue significantly influences whether an organization actively invests in programs and advocacy focused on environmental migration. I theorize that organizations with more significant financial capacity can go beyond low-cost virtue signaling about their commitment to environmental justice and instead invest resources in this issue. On the contrary, I do not find support for the demand-side theory, where I posited that organizations working in countries more vulnerable to climate change are more likely to invest in environmental migration.
Religion in Contentious Times: Climate Change, Abortion Rights, and War
(2023-09-27) Mrchkovska, Nela; Prakash, Aseem; Gill, Anthony
Religion remains a potent force in our modern society, influencing people's lives and guiding their answers to existential questions in an ever-evolving world. The enduring nature of religion lies in its ability to be shaped by, as much as it shapes, the society it inhabits. This dissertation presents three empirical studies highlighting the role of religion, both from an institutional and individual perspective, in addressing three pressing contemporary issues: climate change, abortion rights, and war. The findings illustrate the adaptability and fluidity of religion in response to local contexts and current events. The first two papers provide a systematic study of how religious leaders, as "street-level bureaucrats" of religious institutions, craft sermons based on the demographic, sociological, and geographical factors of their communities, as well as concurrent events. What clergy choose to address in their sermons is not random. Instead, sermon topics are a product of their authors' beliefs, perceptions of their congregations' needs, and central norms and rules. Both papers use an original and unique dataset of 220,000 weekly sermons collected from 3,000 congregations across the United States. The content of the sermons provides insight into how, where, and when clergy engage politically- and socially-charged topics such as climate change and abortion rights. In a religiously pluralistic society, where individuals can choose where to seek spiritual guidance, the messages they hear during their weekly meetings are arguably a large determinant in what shapes their choice of congregation. Thus, choosing topics to include in weekly sermons are of great strategic importance to clergy. The first paper "Hear Ye, Hear Ye: When and Where Religious Leaders Preach on Climate Change" explores this process by studying how congregations address the contentious issue of climate change in their weekly meetings. As climate change and its consequences are increasingly framed as a moral issue, the religious interpretation of the human connection to the environment has varied tremendously across religious bodies as has the frequency with which clergy engage with this topic. Using text analysis tools, a dictionary-based approach and text classification with Large Language Models (LLMs), I find that both demographic characteristics of the congregations' surrounding neighborhood and environmental factors help explain this variation. Across different models and subsets, the political ideology of the local neighborhood is a persistent factor in how frequently climate-related discourse appears in weekly sermons. Evidence from these analyses also shows that the level of income and the racial composition of the neighborhood, as well as the level of air pollution in the surrounding area of a given congregation, are also strong determinants of climate change discourse in congregations. Thus, the findings suggest that the salience of an issue in a given local context drive how clergy perceive the needs and wants of their communities and address their congregations accordingly, which highlights religion's ability to cater to its flocks. The second paper titled "Holy Words, Contentious Topic: Analysis of Political Speech on Abortion Rights in Religious Sermons" tracks the same process on another contentious issue -- abortion rights. This paper also engages with the perceived wants and needs of the local neighborhood and exogenous factors related to abortion rights, but it includes an additional set of determinants. Specifically, it includes the hierarchy of a given congregation based on its denomination (centralized versus decentralized) and the size of the supportive network of the congregation (number of congregations from the same denomination that are relatively close in space to one another). These two additional factors account for clergy's incentives and resourcefulness and connection of congregations in engaging with contentious topics. Utilizing difference-in-difference study design and leveraging the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, I find that in states where the decision had considerable socio-legal implications for communities, congregations address abortion more, but they only do so in communities where the denominational position on abortion rights aligns with the perceived ideological position of the congregation's surrounding neighborhood. This effect is amplified if the congregation is embedded within a supportive network and when clergy are dependent on the local community rather than centralized religious bodies in securing their positions. The findings in this paper align with the findings from the first one in that, in both cases, the frequency of the topics of interest was driven largely by the local context. In the third paper of this dissertation "The (Not So) Sacred Image of Russia: Survey Experiment on Popular Support of Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine War", I shift from a focus on sermons and the clergy's role in shaping and/or adapting to congregant perceptions to explore religion's role as a source of long-term identity and how that identity may manifest itself in forming opinion of contemporary events. One's religious identity is formed through a process of socialization that involves larger social (religious) groups influencing underlying values, preferences, and behavior. To what extent this identity formation affects the reaction to important political and social events is a topic of interest to scholars. I address this topic with a survey experiment in the context of the contentious Russia-Ukraine war, specifically within Bulgaria -- a society historically and nationally tied to one major religion, Christian Orthodoxy, and one that has had a complex and involved relationship with Russia. I investigate the significance of affiliating with the Christian Orthodox faith in shaping in-group attitudes when the Russia-Ukraine war is framed as a cultural-religious war with Russia as the Christian Orthodox protector on one side, and Western-backed Ukraine on the other. I find that respondents' attitudes toward the war are not driven by their religious affiliation, nor the intensity of their religious identity, beliefs or behavior, but rather by the level of information they receive regarding the war as well as their fears of being drawn into the war. These findings suggest that concurrent events and information mitigate the extent to which religion can influence preferences and attitudes in a given society. In our modern society, where religion competes with the advances of science and technology, and the forces of secular and rational thought, the socio-political relevance of religion depends on its ability to adapt. As evidence from this dissertation shows, religious institutions are flexible with respect to the needs and desires of their constituencies, but religious identity isn't always salient in all contexts. This indicates the complex nature that religious belief and religious institutions play in human behavior, a topic of inquiry that will continue to intrigue scholars in decades to come. Competing to retain and attract members, religious institutions respond to community demands, prompting individuals to continually seek comfort and guidance from the pews. By doing so, they not only maintain their relevance in individuals' personal realm but also sustain themselves as institutional pillars, even in an age where many see them as obsolete. As a social identifier and embodiment of values and beliefs, religion's power is constrained by our information-rich, globalized world. However, when religion adapts to modern challenges, it showcases its most resilient nature. This dissertation highlights these mechanisms by considering three contentious issues in a comparative context.
Technology and Elections in Developing Countries: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratic Consolidation
(2023-08-14) Wack, Morgan; Long, James D.
This dissertation looks at the intersection of technology and politics in developing countries. Specifically, I examine how the dissemination of innovative technologies has influenced public opinion and political engagement in and around elections. My first paper details how the adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has upended the usefulness of fraudulent elections in non-democracies. Drawing on evidence from Nicaragua’s illegitimate 2021 presidential election, I detail how ICTs enable citizens to circumvent the intended signals from the FSLN by providing access to external information. I find that access to ICTs reduced the overall levels of perceived support for the ruling FSLN as well as incumbent President Daniel Ortega. In my second paper, I examine the role of new technologies in the amplification of political misinformation related to electoral legitimacy along with the efficacy of digital interventions aimed at reducing its influence. First, I examine social media posts collected throughout Kenya’s contentious 2022 presidential election campaign to illustrate the extent of the challenge posed by political misinformation to perceptions of the legitimacy of the vote. In doing so, I detail the deficiencies of current fact-checking efforts while generating novel insights regarding the challenge of political misinformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Next, I test a new method that incorporates insights from regional organizations to counter misinformation. I find evidence that “social truth queries” may be effective as a user-driven method for addressing misinformation that exists beyond the bounds of current fact-checking efforts in developing countries. My final paper addresses the consequences of a ruling party’s failure to deliver energy to the public. Drawing on a unique spatial dataset and electoral data collected from a variety of government sources in South Africa, I examine whether the dominance of the ANC has minimized the efficacy of electoral accountability mechanisms despite the party’s association with the failure of the country’s once admired national electricity grid. Specifically, I detail how salient governance provision failures, as proxied by “load shedding” in South Africa, reduce support for incumbent political parties while inducing both voter apathy and preference for alternative forms of government in a manner largely consistent with theories of electoral accountability. Collectively, my research details the influential consequences of technological diffusion and decay in developing countries while providing new evidence related to the potential of select digital interventions as well as the potential consequences of inadequate maintenance of existing technologies.
Essays on the Demand for and Supply of Cash Waqfs in the Muslim World
(2023-08-14) Mohamed Supiyan, Muhamad Yusri Bin; Gill, Anthony
I address two broad questions regarding cash waqfs, which are Islamic law-sanctioned crowdfunding-style platforms established to provide public goods and services in the Muslim world. First, why do Muslims want to contribute voluntarily to cash waqf programs? Second, what explains the existence of different types of institutions that offer cash waqfs across different Muslim-majority states? The second and third chapters address the first question and how trust motivates donors to contribute to cash waqf programs. In the second chapter on Malaysia, I show that when donors have options over contributing to a public and private version of the same good, the preference for the latter is motivated by generalized trust in unknown others. Donors who trust strangers believe that others would also prefer the better quality private good option, especially when the quality of the pre-existing public good option is widely known to be substandard. In the third chapter on Pakistan, I show that when donors have the option of contributing to cash waqf programs offered by for-profits and non-profits, those who opt to contribute to the former are driven by institutional trust. Although for-profit institutions may have little business in the field of charity and public goods provision, donors may perceive them to be more trustworthy vis-Ã -vis non-profits. The fourth chapter tackles the second broad question and addresses why cash waqfs are offered by the state in Malaysia but by Islamic banks in Bangladesh. In this chapter, I argue that the colonial legacies of divergent approaches toward the management of religion in British India and British Malaya shaped how Islam has been administered, which extends to the sphere of religious charity. The judicial approach to manage religion in British India did not create an extensive bureaucracy to administer religion, leaving elbowroom for initiatives such as cash waqfs to emerge in the private sector later. The emergence of all-encompassing bureaucracies in British Malaya, first at the state level and later at the federal level in an independent Malaysia, to regulate Islam meant that all matters pertaining to religion fell strictly within the purview of the state, including cash waqfs.

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